IoT Hardware: Top IoT Chip Manufacturing Companies

One of the biggest challenges facing today and tomorrow’s product manufacturers is the demands of the Internet of Things on their business. Before ‘IoT’, there was a clear(er) line between what was analog and what was digital. As the cloud economy booms, software development continues to thrive, and electronics get smaller and smaller, we continue towards a future where everything from your toothbrush to your car tires, are becoming connected. This new reality is forcing traditional product companies to go beyond creating a website or online customer service portal for their customers. This new change is demanding brands of all size, understand more about the three things that enable IoT products; hardware, software, and connectivity.

Over the next month, we will be covering these three areas in depth, starting first, with the top IoT chip manufacturing companies that are enabling today’s generation of ‘smart’ products for the home and business.

At the heart of every Internet of Things (IoT) system, microscopic transistors process millions of discrete computing steps almost instantaneously. These semiconductor devices drive the plethora of IoT advancements for business organizations to transform operations, automate mundane processes, establish insightful decision-making capabilities and ultimately yield unprecedented new revenue streams. Global chip manufacturers continue to lead breakthrough innovation in IoT chip manufacturing, fabricating twice as many transistors every 18 months as per the prevalent Moore’s Law. The best among top IoT chip manufacturers include:

Intel is at the heart of the IoT revolution with decades of industry-proven experience in manufacturing advanced processing technologies for businesses and consumers following the rapid pace of Moore’s Law.

As a global leader in mobile processor and connectivity technologies, Qualcomm delivers off-the-shelf IoT products for a range of industry verticals. The company is inclined toward consumer-oriented IoT applications with initiatives such as smart home and smart cities. Qualcomm IoT products allow consumers to transform the existing home network and power infrastructure into a connectivity hub for mobility-based IoT use-cases.

ARM operates on a distinct business model of creating and licensing its technologies as intellectual property to third-party IoT vendors. Licensees of ARM processors for IoT applications range from consumer technology giants Apple and Samsung, to enterprise technology vendors IBM, Qualcomm and Intel, among others.

ARM IoT offerings range from sensors and processing chips to networking equipment and cloud servers establishing an end-to-end IoT hardware infrastructure. The company also provides development platforms such as the ARM mbed solution for third-party IoT vendors and business organizations to create IoT applications based on ARM microcontrollers.

The current generation of Atmel microcontrollers extends the industry-proven Atmel 8051 microcontroller architecture for next-generation IoT use cases. The extensive portfolio of Atmel microcontrollers is designed for pin-to-pin compatibility with end-of-lifecycle legacy 8051 devices still working effectively across a range of IoT and automation applications.

Atmel also develops other devices constituting the front-end of IoT systems including sensors, wireless solutions, touch screens and wearable gadgets, among others.

Freescale IoT solutions include embedded processors, microcontrollers and multi-faceted sensors used in industrial, healthcare, automotive, smart energy as well as consumer applications. The company refers to its Internet of Tomorrow philosophy as an advancement of IoT in terms of highly connected and secure end-nodes within enterprise-wide cloud networks.

Freescale’s off-the-shelf IoT applications are primarily aimed at automotive, healthcare and smart energy industries. The company also adopts ARM processors for IoT vendors and business organizations to develop custom IoT systems. These systems are complemented with Freescale Sensor Data Analytics capabilities guiding insightful decisions from the data generated by Freescale sensors and the wider IoT infrastructure.

While this list does not encompass the full spectrum of chip makers currently in the IoT space, it highlights some of the key IoT chip manufacturing companies. Stay tuned next week as we continue to explore the three fundamental areas of IoT, this time focusing on the radio modules that are enabling connectivity between devices.